`Big Fat Idiot' Gives Rush A Run For His Money

February 22, 1996|By Eric Zorn.

A month ago in this space, I asked: Where in the mainstream of American political commentary are the rabid attack dogs of the left? Who are the scurrilous and irresponsible liberals spewing poisonous half-truths in order to ridicule and impugn conservatives?

On America Online I called this "The Linda Challenge," after syndicated ultraright columnist Linda Bowles, who'd just made her first weekly appearance in the Tribune. And look, the woman is a crackpot--a font of insulting invective, political paranoia and theories borrowed from pamphleteers--but as a good liberal I do not hold this against her. She may have had a crackpot childhood.

Yet the right seems to be well-stocked with such ideological bomb-throwers. What about the left?

The response from readers was feeble. Most offered up names of familiar liberal writers--the retired Anna Quindlen, for example--whose points of view are often strong but generally measured. A number of conservative pundits meet this description as well, I should add, and I admire many of them, though I usually disagree with their conclusions.

Another respondent objected, "That's not the way liberals attack. . . . Liberals prefer to attack conservatives with smug and often unspoken assertions about their own moral superiority."

Only one reader met The Linda Challenge. He submitted a passage from a recent syndicated column by Garry Wills that says the National Rifle Association wants "everyone . . . totally armed." The NRA, Wills wrote, "presses to have every kind of weapon, even the most destructive, put in the possession of every kind of person, even the most irresponsible."

This is, in all seriousness, a profound misrepresentation through exaggeration of the NRA's position and therefore irrelevant to any productive discussion. If Wills made a habit of it, he'd be the lefties' Linda, the elusive red-meat liberal.

But he doesn't. In fact, the closest we have to such a figure is humorist Al Franken, whose current book, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations," (Delacorte Press, $21.95) is filled with hostility and gratuitous insults.

On Page 142 of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," for example, Franken simply lists 37 ways to allude to the conservative radio commentator's girth: "Meat show," "Suet-boy" and so on. On Page 24 he calls Limbaugh "a loathsome piglet. I mean pig, because (he's) so fat," and on Page 201, "an obese millionaire with a repugnant political agenda."

Does such sniping advance the debate over the proper direction of our country? No, it does not.

He frequently invokes Gingrich's marital and other alleged domestic woes, noting on Page 71 of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" that he is "a little sick of cranky Republicans who can't keep their own families together (he includes Gramm, Limbaugh, Bob Dole and George Will here too) telling everybody else about family values."

And beginning on Page 127 of "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," Franken reproduces charts from Limbaugh's own books and annotates them with handwritten scrawls that several times call Limbaugh a schoolyard vulgarism for the male appendage.

The context, however, is a statistical argument that Reaganomics actually harmed the average citizen. Therefore, Franken says, Limbaugh serves as little more than "the carnival clown hired to distract the crowd while paramedics carry the mangled bodies from a derailed roller coaster."

Franken doesn't quite meet The Linda Challenge because he backs up the "cheap, tawdry, mean-spirited bile" (his words) with plenty of sharp detail. This is certainly part of the reason that "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" will move up to No. 1 on the New York Times list of best-selling non-fiction hardbacks this Sunday.

Another part of the reason is that many liberals, too, enjoy the simple but shameful pleasure of having someone broadly, gleefully and without nuance trash their political opponents.

But I will rise above that today by concluding with a nice observation: